412 { China’s Quest
performers. When Deng hugged and kissed several of the children, the audi-
ence was deeply moved. Journalists noted that many in the audience were cry-
ing. Another moment came during a dinner at the White House with movie
actress Shirley MacLaine in attendance. MacLaine had visited China during
the Cultural Revolution era in the early 1970s and had been very impressed
by the Maoist efforts to construct a new, model society. At the White House
dinner in 1979, MacLaine recalled how, during her visit to China, she had met
a university professor growing vegetables in a farm in the countryside. When
asked if he felt a loss at having to do physical labor and abandon scientific
research at the university, the professor had professed happiness at learning
so much from the poor peasants with whom he worked. After listening to
the story and pausing for a moment, Deng replied “That professor was lying.”
Deng’s Harvard-educated English-language translator Ji Chaozhu, who wit-
nessed this exchange, recalled: “MacLaine’s jaw dropped. Carter, who had
been listening, nodded gravely. I knew then that China’s true liberation
was finally at hand”^27 When this episode was conveyed by the media to the
American public, many people reached a conclusion similar to Ji Chaozhu’s.
The most famous moment of Deng’s US visit came at a rodeo outside
Houston, Texas. After concluding his visit and talks in Washington, DC,
Deng visited Atlanta, Houston, and Seattle. Designed to give China’s new
leader a view of diverse aspects of American life, a cowboy rodeo was far from
the ken of China’s leader. Yet when one of the horse-mounted young women
in the program rode up to the vice premier and offered him a ten-gallon cow-
boy hat, Deng readily took it and put it on. Then, accompanied by similarly
hatted translator Ji Chaozhu, Deng left the stands, climbed into an old-style
American stagecoach, and took a spin around the arena, waving to an au-
dience going wild with cheers, applause, and laughter at the incongruous
sight of the leader of the Chinese Communist Party, in his austere Mao tunic,
decked out like an American cowboy. Deng’s natural charisma, personal con-
fidence, and willingness to be a good sport transformed an event that had the
potential to make China’s leader look like a fool into a brilliant public rela-
tions coup, showing a man of supreme self-confidence holding out a hand of
understanding and friendship to the American people.
Throughout his American tour, Deng stressed China’s backwardness, its
need to work hard to catch up, and his deep interest in US technological prow-
ess in that regard. In Atlanta, he visited a Ford automobile factory. In Houston,
he visited Hughes Tool Company, manufacturing modern rigs for offshore
petroleum drilling. In Seattle, he visited Boeing aircraft. In Houston, he vis-
ited the Johnson Space Center, the headquarters of the National Aeronautic
and Space Administration and command center for the US space exploration
program. Deng expressed deep interest in what he saw. After trying out a flight
simulator modeling the landing of a spacecraft from 100,000 feet, he requested
a second attempt. Even then, he was reluctant to leave the device.